River City Girls 2 Review

ign.com:

The Kunio-kun series is so old and spans so many consoles that you may have stumbled across one of its games without even knowing it’s part of a connected universe of beat-’em-ups. The best-known of them – Super Dodge Ball, Double Dragon, and River City Ransom – are all separate stories revolving around how there never seems to be a deficit of faces to punch in River City. River City Girls 2 is both a sequel to the excellent 2019 beat-‘em-up and the final form of the action-RPG design that River City Ransom pioneered in the late ‘80s. It’s only marginally different from the one before it, choosing to refine systems and expand in size instead of entirely overhauling how anything works. But when you kicked so much butt the first time, why change your technique?

The details of how and why the Yakuza that Kyoko and Misako thought they’d chased out of the city in the previous game are back are shaky, but they and their punchable faces have taken over the school and all the local hangout spots. That's reason enough to start their two-fisted crusade to rid them from the streets, one cracked skull or broken rib at a time. While the story itself is light and easy to ignore, the writing is sharp and funny. I consistently chuckled at the one-liners and the banter between the protagonists and the various enemies and side characters they encountered.

You get straight into the brawling pretty quickly, with all four returning characters – our two leading ladies and their boyfriends, River City Ransom heroes Kunio and Riki – playable out of the gate in single-player or up to four-player co-op. Though leveling up and gaining new techniques organically or through purchase at the dojo turns the combat system into a robust palette for violent